Now, philanthropists may
easily imagine there is a skillful method of
disarming and overcoming an enemy without great bloodshed, and that this
is the proper tendency of the Art of War.
 Carl von Clausewitz, On War1

They will all be finished because there is no choice, there is just death.
 General Mustafa Said Qadir, March 2003.2

War is about power. Power is about getting another actor either to
engage in behavior he would not otherwise have undertaken, to cease or modify behavior in
which he is presently engaged, or to refrain from behavior in which he is intending to
engage. In the words of Clausewitz, war is an act of violence intended to compel our
opponent to fulfill our will.3

In the several
millennia of organized armed conflict, the surest way to affect the behavior of ones
opponents has been to kill enough of them or so degrade their armaments that as a
collectivity they are no longer able to resist. Now we are told that an ongoing Revolution
in Military Affairs (RMA) is bidding fair to render that approach to the conduct of war
obsolete. A loosely related family of visions of the future conduct of war has developed
under the general rubric of the RMA. Although pitched as innovative, all of these visions
owe their fundamental tenets to various strains of thought with long histories. Some of
these visions have been given official sanction and have been exercised in various ways by
joint commands and by the individual services.4

This article
addresses one theory as emblematic of the larger universe of new ideas.
Published in late 1996, the book Shock and Awe:

114/15

Achieving Rapid
Dominance elaborates and proposes a comprehensive vision of Americas conduct of
war in the futureRapid Dominance.5
It evidently has found a receptive audience among current senior US civilian and military
leaders. Consistent with theories of air power dating to Hugh Trenchard, Giulio Douhet,
and William Mitchell, the self-described goal of Rapid Dominance is to destroy or so
confound the will to resist that an adversary will have no alternative except to accept
our strategic aims and military objectives.6 Relying on
deception, misinformation, and disinformation, Rapid Dominance requires the ability to:
anticipate and counter all opposing moves; deny an opponent objectives of critical value;
convey the unmistakable message that unconditional compliance is the only available
recourse; and control the environment and master all levels of an opponents
activities to affect his will, perception, and understanding, including communications,
transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure, as
well as the denial of military responses.

Rapid Dominance
assumes that for the present and foreseeable future, with the Cold War over: US military
forces are the most capable in the world; given domestic political dynamics, US military
capability will shrink; the US commercial-industrial base provides a technological
advantage the military can and must exploit; and US forces are and will continue to be
deployed and engaged worldwide, with a relatively high operating tempo.

These factors are
not surprising and fairly reflect the present operating environment for US forces. The
advocates of Rapid Dominance believe that these factors, taken together, mean that
overwhelming or decisive force, as advocated by former Defense Secretary
Caspar Weinberger and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell, is going to
be neither possible nor desirable, and a different approach is therefore required.7 The advocates therefore argue that the United States must
develop a military force characterized by near total or absolute knowledge and
understanding of self, adversary, and environment; rapidity and timeliness in
application; operational brilliance in execution; and (near) total
control and signature management of the entire operational environment.8

Absent a peer
competitor (such as the former Soviet Union), and given US technological superiority and
the militarys high degree of profes-

115/16

sionalism, the US
military is presumed to enter any conflict with such a tremendous edge that its
adversaries will have virtually no chance to respond. Taken together, these
characteristics suppose, in essence, that the enemy will never present US forces with
surprise sufficient to throw them off their operational plans. Put differently, it is
alleged that Rapid Dominance will, for all intents and purposes, eliminate the fog of war.

Consequently, as
advertised, Rapid Dominance offers powerful enticements, bound to appeal to high-level
defense decisionmakers. It exploits the US technological advantage over potential
opponents in information and precision weapons. It employs lighter forces, more readily
deployed using less lift. It emphasizes air over ground forces. It promises to achieve
military objectives at higher speed and lower cost than through the use of overwhelming
force, with fewer casualties (ours and theirs, military and civilian), and with less
damage to the adversarys physical infrastructure, lessening post-conflict expenses.

These promises
appeal to commonly held American views on war: substitution of capital for personnel,
economic efficiency, low casualty rates for friend and foe alike, and quick operations
with clear-cut beginnings and ends.9 And it might work, given relatively weak,
unsophisticated opponents whose decisionmaking calculus employs a cost-benefit approach
with strategic objectives not dissimilar to those encountered in most Western cultures.

Nonetheless, the
theorys assumptions about the US ability to instrumentally manipulate the will of
its adversaries reflect a fundamentally optimistic approach to the conduct of warfare.10 The problem with optimism in any endeavor, but with
especially profound consequences in war, is that it restricts anticipation of error,
minimizes its probability, and leads to the concealment of both its occurrence and the
severity of its effects.11 Under a regime of optimism, errors may accumulate without
recognition to a level that ultimately negates our ability to respond effectively, or
requires a cost we may be unwilling to pay. Given the long lead time in the development of
weapon systems and force structures, compounded by the dual problems of sunk costs and
opportunity costs, in the domain of armed conflict this may translate to an unnecessary
loss of blood and treasure if not actually to losing the war. This article considers one
of the several optimistic assumptions on which the theory of Rapid Dominance is founded:
It is best to attack enemy will directly.

The Three
Pillars of Behavior

The insistence by
the advocates of Rapid Dominance on redirecting our principal focus from an enemys
capability to his will demands close, careful attention. Social psychologists have long
understood that human behavior results from the complex interplay of three pillars:
motivation, capa-

116/17

bility, and
opportunity. All three must be present in order for behavior to occur: each is necessary,
none sufficient unto itself to produce behavior.12

Motivation refers to
the animus for behavior and includes the affective aspects of attitudes, desires, ends,
aims, goals, objectives, desired end states, and the like. Intensity or strength of
motivation is typically denoted as willin the context of war, specifically, the will
to resist or to continue fighting. These affective components are related to, affect, and
are affected by but must be distinguished from cognitive aspects of the adversarys
psychology, which include structures of knowledge and perceptions of the battlefield.
(This article does not systematically address these cognitive aspects.13)

Capability refers to
the wherewithal necessary to actually engage in behavior, including psychological factors
such as intelligence and possession of relevant knowledge and factual information, along
with physical factors such as personnel, equipment, supplies, technologies, etc.
Opportunity refers to the occasion suitable for or conducive to the behavior, including
such factors as geography and time.

Violence, that is to
say, physical force (for there is no moral force without the conception of States and
Law), is therefore the MEANS; the compulsory submission of the enemy to our will is the
ultimate object. In order to attain this object fully, the enemy must be disarmed, and
disarmament becomes therefore the immediate OBJECT of hostilities in theory.14

There are good and
sound reasons for this focus: once capability is degraded or destroyed, irrespective of
motivation, an adversary simply cannot act as he may wish. Equally important, capabilities
are more or less directly observable andnotwithstanding enemy efforts at concealment
and deception their degradation or destruction is largely knowable. At the same
time, developing relevant, meaningful measures of effectiveness for degradation of enemy
capabilities remains a complex and difficult task, and we do not always get it right. At a
minimum, measures of effectiveness must address the effects of our actions on an
accurately determined enemy center of gravity.15

Similarly,
opportunity for an adversary to act may be manipulated by means of some combination of
weapons of relatively greater reach (rifled guns, cruise missiles), choice of military
objective, deception, surprise, and movement and maneuverall of which we have
historically employed and continually seek to exploit in ever more systematic and
effective ways.

If its principal
focus has historically been upon affecting capability and manipulating opportunity,
warfare has not ignored the matter of will. Few can fail to be aware, for example, of Sun
Tzus admonishment that the skillful

117/18

leader attacks
by stratagem and thereby subdues the enemys troops without any fighting; he
captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without
lengthy operations in the field.16
And, indeed, the advocates of Rapid Dominance reference Sun Tzu in this regard. But the
masters recommendation can be properly understood only by recognizing its historical
context. As two students of Sun Tzu recently have pointed out, such misty-mythic
references serve numerous purposes, but most critically they ally the author with a figure
whose strategic wisdom is unquestionable, therefore impregnating the text with nearly
scriptural authority.17 This approach may pass in academic discourseif even
therebut it is a thin, cold gruel on which to base public policy which profoundly
affects lives.

In the contemporary
setting, military decisionmakers clearly recognize the value of psychological and
information operations in prosecuting war. But Sun Tzu intended this stratagem not as a
replacement for but as an adjunct complementary to the use of force, and in any event he
surely never supposed that the work would be used as a direct guide for thought and
action in war. Rather, it constituted an assault on what Sun Tzu believed to be the
flawed strategic culture of his time.

The central problem
is that enemy motivations in the form of intentions and will typically have proven more
opaque and resistant to understanding than have capability and opportunity. Intentions and
will are, like all psychological phenomena, latent variables. That is, they cannot be
directly observed. Their existence, direction, and strength can only be inferred by their
postulated association or correlation with other, directly observable variables.18 It
is not impossible to develop relatively reliable indirect measures of latent variables,
but such requires considerable investment of time and other scarce resources in design,
testing, and validation. Developing measures of effectiveness that will allow us to know
whether we are actually achieving our intended manipulation and degradation of enemy
intention and will is likely to never be more than partially successful.

Compounding the
problem is that in seeking to understand an adversary, whether state or non-state, our
analysis must push beyond the individual level to address the complex interactions of the
opponents leaders as a collective. Although as a matter of course we refer to the
behavior of states, one cannot assume that our adversaries senior leadership will
all be of like mind, especially on such matters as continuing the fight. Here we must be
concerned with both formal and informal organizational processes and the dynamics of
social groups.19 The former may be relatively visible, but
the latter will be much less so and will require considerable human intelligence to
assess. It is only now, nearly six decades after the end of World War II, that historians
have at last pieced together a reasonably complete and accurate picture of the largely

118/19

invisible
interactions of senior Japanese military and civilian leaders over the issues of whether
and how to continue the war against the Allies.20 This becomes especially important (and thorny) when armies engage
adversaries that possess the trappings of modern institutions without the reality of them,
run not on well-institutionalized rules and procedures but on personal relationships,
if not Stalinesque cults of personality supported by shadowy coteries. Unfortunately,
armed conflicts for the foreseeable future appear likely to occur increasingly in areas
that largely lack such modern institutions, and, if recent events are any bellwether,
against well-resourced and well-organized non-state actors who will prove to be even more
opaque.21

States need to be
very specific about what actors at what levels are appropriately targeted: whose will are
they trying to collapse? Should the United States target the will of our adversarys
strategic leadership? Its operational commanders? Its tactical units? Odds are that the
appropriate level of targeting will vary greatly across the range of potential
adversaries. Planners cannot assume that even should the will of an adversarys
leadership be broken, then subordinate commanders and units will necessarily elect to
surrender. That is, the degree and character of connectedness across the opponents
hierarchy is an empirical matter that cannot be assumed a priori. Units may of
their own volition elect to fight on, even after any real hope of altering the outcome has
long passed. The stated unwillingness of the Japanese army commander in mainland China to
surrender to what he saw as a defeated Chinese military greatly worried senior Japanese
leadership at the end of World War II after they had formally sued for peace with the
Allies. Worse, perhaps, are those cases in which subordinate units have been instructed to
fight on, possibly to the death, even should the leadership be toppled.22

It is a relatively
simple matter to ascertain the enemys military capabilityhis forces,
technologies, doctrine, deployments, combat effectiveness. It is exponentially more
complex to assess accurately the cultural coding which conditions his choice of objectives
and the decisionmaking in support of themthat is, his motivations. The American
propensity to mirror-image, either explicitly or implicitly, is remarkably strong and has
proven resilient even in the face of unequivocal evidence of the errors inherent in doing
so.

119/20

Thus, the intentions
of both individuals and collective entities are notoriously difficult to fathom, a
difficulty exacerbated to the extent that the culture of the adversary is distant from
ones own. In warfare, a key aspect of motivation is the willingness to incur
costs, particularly in the form of casualties. Non-Western foes, especially, have again
and again demonstrated a willingness to absorb casualties that by any Western calculus
bear little proportionality to what might be gained from them. Witness, for example: (1)
Mao and the Long March; (2) the Peoples Republic of Chinas express willingness
to accept possible US atomic attack in consequence of entering the Korean War in October
1950; (3) PRC human-wave tactics during the US Marines fighting withdrawal from
Chosen to Hamhung in December 1950; and (4) Japanese willingness to sustain 35 to 40
percent casualties merely in redeploying troops by water transport from mainland China to
the Philippines during World War II. And has anyone forgotten the extraordinary loss of
life accepted by the North Vietnamese during the 10,000-day war?23

On this point, Fleet
Admiral Nimitz observed that the only real surprisesat the operational level of
warpresented by the Japanese during World War II were the Kamikaze (and other
suicide tactics) and their nearly absolute unwillingness to surrender even in the face of
clearly overwhelming odds.24 The latter first presented itself during
the initial US offensive against the Japanese at Guadalcanal and in conjunction with the
August 1942 assaults on Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo. Of the estimated 1,500
defenders, only 23 prisoners were taken, while perhaps 70 Japanese escaped to Florida
Island.25 Although clearly noted in after-action reports, the lesson was
neither quickly nor effectively integrated into the US understanding of its enemy. Again,
at Tarawa in November 1943 the US Marines found themselves pitted against a foe that would
not surrenderonly 150 of 4,900 defenders were left alive at battles end.

Later, when Japanese
surface suicide boats attacked US amphibious shipping at the January 1945 Lingayen
landings, the actuality of the suicide tactics was so far removed from US understanding
that we believed the attacks were carried out by conventional motor torpedo boats. Four
months later, while operation plans for Okinawa at least recognized the possibility of
aerial Kamikaze attacks, they contained no provisions for defense against surface
suicide boats.26 By the end of the Okinawa operation, the
Japanese had sunk three dozen US ships and damaged 368, mostly by Kamikazes. US
Navy casualties included nearly 4,900 dead. It was a surprise that carried considerable
weight. Winston Churchill later observed after his January 1945 Yalta meeting with
Franklin Roosevelt that the President had displayed concern at Japanese suicide
attacks in the Pacific, which meant constantly losing forty or fifty Americans for one
Japanese, and he was not very hopeful about an early

120/21

end of either
war.27 And that was before Okinawa. No comparable surprise ever came from
our Western foes, the Germans or the Italians.

These examples
compel attention also to the interactions among motivation, capability, and opportunity.
For example, an adversary willing to incur high casualties (motivation) might well launch
a major land operation in the face of winter (opportunity) even lacking appropriate winter
clothing and equipment (capability)something we would be loath to do.28

The
Unknowability of Will

Let us assume for
the moment that the adversarys psyche is practically knowable. We then must still
contrive a course of action that will effectively destroy his will. Rapid Dominance
explicitly assumes that a message can be constructed and sent to an adversary which will
cause him to inescapably conclude that resistance would be futile. But what if the
adversarys objective is simply to remain both alive and in power, even at the
expense of all other things, a calculus almost incomprehensible to the American mind? Or,
worse (perhaps) the enemys objective may lack concreteness in the Western sense. For
example, al Qaeda surely has no aim to hold territory or maintain regime control; rather,
one objective is simply to enact the process of violent opposition to the West, while its
long-term objective is to foment widespread conflict between the Islamic world and the
West. Given these objectives, what would shock and awe these foes into
submission, short of their destruction?

There is historical
precedent for this problem. In January 1943 President Roosevelt stunned virtually
everyone, though perhaps not Churchill, by announcing that we would seek the unconditional
surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan. By mid-1943, some perspicacious Japanese leaders,
not unreasonably, interpreted this to mean that though Japan could not realistically
expect to win the war, it must end the war on negotiated terms it could bear. American
popular support for the war was perceived as a critical weakness that could be exploited
to get at the strategic center of gravitythe US civilian leadership. Japan decided
to attack this weakness by causing as many American military casualties as possible,
believing that an American unwillingness to sustain casualties would soon compel it to
cease its otherwise inexorable drive on Japan. Thus, systematic attacks on American
amphibious shipping at the beachhead became policynot to defeat American landings
(although orders and propaganda were couched in such terms), for the Japanese fully
understood that American forces could ultimately take any objective they wished, but in
order to inflict casualties on an available target. Because its conventional forces were
unable to compete force-on-force with those of the United States, an asymmetrical
stratagem of special attack forces was developed and executed (i.e., Kamikaze
pilots were instructed to

121/22

target amphibious
shipping and aircraft carriers; surface suicide boats aimed for transports). Defense of
the Japanese Home Islands also included an elaborate system of special attack
weapons.29 From the US perspective this constituted a baffling continuation
of the war by an adversary who surely knew he was beaten and could not hope to win.

Conversely, the
so-called terror bombing by Allied air forces of urban populations in Germany and Japan
did not yield the results sought: the fundamental collapse of civilian support for their
regimes. The Japanese endured staggering casualtieson the night of 9-10 March 1945,
more than 300 B-29 Superfortresses bombed Tokyo with incendiaries, destroying nearly 16
square miles, killing 80,000 to 100,000 people, almost all civilians, and leaving one
million homeless. By wars end, including the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
atomic bombs, the United States had destroyed 178 square miles in 66 of Japans major
cities, forcing 8.5 million people from their homes.30

Non-Western foes
historically have not placed the same value on the individual as have Western cultures,
instead placing the collectivity in primacy. In combination with values embedded in those
cultures which rationalize or celebrate the death of individuals in support of the
collectivitys welfare, these values render Western calculations of measured force
almost wholly irrelevant. Reinforce these values with an authoritarian regime which does
not meaningfully depend upon the consent of its governed, and one has a ready recipe for
considerable mischief.31

This is no more than
to recognize that ones adversaries have an innate, probably infinite, capacity for
what appears to us to be the essence of irrationality and the height of folly, but which
makes sense within their own collective psychology. If war between and among Western
states seems increasingly remote in the foreseeable future, and if analysts are correct
that the focus of our attentions is ineluctably migrating toward Asian areas, the problems
of effectively understanding the mindsets of potential and actual foes will only be
exacerbated.32 Although convenient, it is at our peril
that we suppose there exists only one way to interpret the world; the long history of two
distinct philosophies may well have produced profound differences in the thought processes
of Occident and Oriental.33 While the means for destruction of capability remains relatively
consistent across a wide range of potential adversariesa SAM is a SAM is a
SAMefforts to manipulate an adversarys will must be differentiated and nuanced
to resonate with the specific culture of each foe.

At the same time,
degrading or destroying enemy capability need not translate to simple force-on-force
operations. For example, the US submarine campaign against Japanese shipping in World War
II effectively degraded Japans ability to continue the war by destroying its
merchant bottoms, especially

122/23

tankers and fleet
oilers. This wreaked havoc with Japans industrial capability to generate military
power, and it starved the Imperial Japanese Navy of fuel for warships, compelling it to
base its dwindling fleet near sources of oil, thereby reducing mobility and operational
tempo, while greatly complicating battle plans. Leyte in October 1944 is but one example.34 It
also reduced to nearly zero Japans ability to train new pilots, given the scarcity
of aviation fuel. Simultaneously, the submarine campaign sharply reduced Japans
ability to import critical war-related mineral resources. The need to construct new
merchant ships to replace those lost imposed a harsh opportunity cost on an already sorely
tested industrial base. Finally, the manifest presence and effectiveness of American
submarines compelled the Japanese to resort to inefficient routings and schedules for
their shipping. The submarine warfare worked because it constituted an attack on a
critical enemy vulnerabilityits island status, inadequate indigenous war-related
resources, and lengthy, poorly protected sea lines of communication (the Japanese never
possessed adequate numbers of escort vessels). In turn, the submarine campaign was founded
on American critical strengthsthe tremendous capabilities of its fleet submarines,
communications intercepts and decryptions, and centralized command and control capacities.

Additionally, let us
remember that while any given action may achieve the objectives sought, it is always
subject to unanticipated consequences, some of which may prove negative or
counterproductive.35 The potential for negative unintended
consequences is inversely related to the extent of cause-and-effect knowledge underlying
any given decision. Planners can therefore expect such consequences when addressing an
adversarys psyche. A World War II example illustrates the point. The August 1942
hit-and-run assault on Makin by Marine Raiders was intended to divert the Japanese from
reinforcing Guadalcanal. Even though the Japanese recognized it for that, it still
accomplished its objective, perhaps too well. The raid so jolted the Japanese as to the
vulnerability of their Gilbert Islands bases that the next month they embarked on an
extensive program of reinforcement and fortification which rendered the November 1943 US
assault on Betiothe key to Tarawa Atoll, which was in turn the key to the Gilberts,
and the opening gambit in the Central Pacific drivevastly more costly in blood and
treasure.36

Perception and
Deception

The other half of
Rapid Dominances focus on the adversarys psychologymanipulating the
perceptions of our adversariesmay be equally elusive. Our enemies have historically
proven wise enough to analyze our previous actions and current doctrine, with an eye
toward their relevance in planning and executing their own operations against us.
Well-planned, well-

123/24

mounted,
sophisticated deception plans may suffer unexpected setbacks. In the run-up to the planned
amphibious assault on the Japanese Home Islands (overall named Operation Downfall, with
Operation Olympic focused on Kyushu, and Operation Coronet as the follow-on for Honshu)
scheduled for autumn 1945, the United States devised and executed an elaborate strategic
deception plan called Pastel. It was intended to persuade the Japanese to not redeploy
their army forces in Mainland China to the Home Islands by making them think we would
continue our blockade of Japan and land on Formosa. American planners believed that even
if Pastel worked as intended, the Japanese would, by 30 days before the actual landings,
have discerned the general assault areas. Consequently, a second deception component was
developed to persuade the Japanese that Shikoku, not Kyushu, was the site of the initial
landings.

The Japanese were
not at all misled by Pastel. They had discerned the intended American targets even before
the landings at Okinawa. Without very much hard intelligence, the Japanese had planned
based on what they believed was consistent with past American operations and US interests:
the Americans were unlikely to attack anywhere that could not be supported by land-based
air, and Kyushus topography would provide both anchorages and airfields required for
an assault on Honshu. No other potential targets offered the same advantages.37

So it was that in
early 1945, even before the Americans had fixed plans for concluding the war, the Japanese
predicted a two-pronged advance from the Marianas toward the Iwo Jima island group
and from the Philippines toward either Taiwan, Shanghai, or Okinawa.38 In April 1945 Imperial General Headquarters outlined the
planned defense of the Home Islands, including plans to funnel reserves from other areas
to Kyushu in case it was attacked or to Tokyo if it were attacked prior to the Kyushu
landings.39 Comparison of the order of battle for
Japanese defenses of Kyushu (derived from signals intercepts) with the American operation
plan shows that the Japanese had clearly divined the precise beaches on which US forces
intended to land. They may have lacked hard intelligence, but they thoroughly understood
our way of doing business.40

124/25

Just as cultural
differences make it difficult to discern an adversarys intentions, the probability
of effectively manipulating his perceptions also decreases as his cultural distance from
our own increasesquite apart from the historic American habit of telegraphing our
moves. If Thomas Barnett is correct in his assertion that the focus of American foreign
policy and military action for the foreseeable future will be along the so-called
arc of instability from the Caribbean Basin through Africa to South and
Central Asia and across to North Koreaand I am persuaded that he isthen the
United States will be addressing an extraordinarily heterogeneous array of state and
non-state threats across a vast and varied geographic area, with the only common threads
being unstable social, economic, and political systems, and the near complete absence of
democracy and modern institutions.41 Thus, we will be almost exclusively
confronting non-Western foes about whom we know relatively little. Although the detailed,
in-depth cultural knowledge necessary for a basic understanding of enemy will and
perception across the arc of instability is, at least in principle,
susceptible of acquisition, gaining such knowledge will require considerable capital
investment, systematic effort, and time.

To date, there is
little indication such investment and effort has been made. Notwithstanding, for example,
Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowskis call for regional expertise as integral
to the success of network-centric operations, the focus has been on technology
and hardware. As Edward Smith has recently had to remind us,

Precise
effects-based warfare will demand more than sensor-based awareness. It will require us to
identify both the specific vulnerability we need to act against and the desired result. To
do this, we need to know the enemy. The process of creating such knowledge of the
enemy will draw on sensor information, to be sure, and will be subject to some time
compression as a result, but is much more a matter of creating regional expertise and
extensive regional and technical intelligence databases. In short, we will find ourselves
reintroducing the human dimension into the loop and expanding our reliance on functions
that must be carried out over months and years, and essentially, must be completed before
the battle even begins.42

Even should we
materially advance our regional expertise, military commanders and civilian leaders will
still have to accord such factors significant weight in their planning and decisionmaking.

Caveats and
Falsifiability

John Dewey argued
many years ago that we are well advised to craft our public policies in such a way that,
like scientific hypotheses, they are subject to falsification. That is, we should
construct them so that they are decid-

125/26

able: we can know
whether they will work as intended.43This perspective is in fact integral to modern military
decisionmaking: woe betide the staff officer who proposes a course of action without tying
it to meaningful measures of effectiveness. If we fail to demand that new approaches to
warfighting be empirically testable, it will be only at our peril, or, rather, at the
peril of those who would go in harms way.

Yet that is
precisely what the proponents of Rapid Dominance would have us do. Its authors propose
several tests of Rapid Dominance: against the major regional contingencies; across the
entire spectrum of operations other than war; for its political consequences, particularly
with respect to deterrence; and concerning its implications for waging alliance and
coalition warfare. But none of these tests is defined sufficiently to allow us
to know whether Rapid Dominance will work. What would be the evidence for its failure or
success?

Moreover, Shock
and Awe is so suffused with caveats and qualifications that it is rendered
fundamentally incapable of refutation by experience. The apologia in the prologue is
instructive:

We note for the
record that should a Rapid Dominance force actually be fielded with the requisite
operational capabilities, this force would be neither a silver bullet nor a panacea and
certainly not an antidote or preventative for a major policy blunder, miscalculation, or
mistake. It should also be fully appreciated that situations will exist in which Rapid
Dominance (or any other doctrine) may not work or apply because of political, strategic,
or other limiting factors.44

Under what specific
conditions would we expect to see it work? Is it appropriate only for a limited set of
adversaries who possess certain characteristics? What are those characteristics? Is it
appropriate only for conventional warfare, or is it supposed to work across the spectrum
of military operations other than war?45
Given such careful qualification, this means we may expect its advocates to interpret any
unsatisfactory results to derive from failure to understand properly what Rapid Dominance
really means or failure to execute it properlyand so we have already seen. Referring
to the war against Iraq, the senior author of Shock and Awe recently complained,
The public misunderstood our concept of shock and aweand so, perhaps, did the
Pentagon.46 The concomitant of this is the standard
plaint that bureaucratic inertia or entrenched interest defeated it, that if only it had
been implemented properly it would have proven effective. The remedy that will be proposed
is predictable: do not call the fundamentals of Rapid Dominance into question; rather,
ensure that more controls are applied to planners and executors so as to ensure conformity
with its dictates.47

When in the future
the United States succeeds militarily against its adversaries, we may be confident that
the proponents of Rapid Dominance

126/27

will claim credit.
But if the explicit assumption of non-peer competitors is accurate, it remains
difficult to imagine any scenario where the United States would not prevail. Were the
German World War II conquests of Poland (1939); Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium,
France (1940); and Bulgaria and Greece (1941) purely consequent on the new Blitzkreig?
Or, excepting France, were they victories of a powerful state over much weaker ones and of
professionally well-educated commanders against commanders of less stature and training?

Concluding
Thoughts

This is not to
advocate a return to force-on-force attrition warfare. It is not to argue for symmetrical
force-on-force operations. Nor is it to press for predictable linear operations in which
objectives are pursued in series. Certainly, it is not an attempt to ignore the many
advantages the United States currently possesses relative to present or near-term foes,
especially those derived from speed, agility, command and control, communications,
intelligence, information, and precision weapons. Similarly, this is not to advocate a
return to the relatively indiscriminate destruction of enemy forces, materiel, cities,
infrastructure, and populations.

It is, however, to
argue for focusing on capabilities and their degradation or destruction by whatever
meanskinetic or otherwiseare deemed most effective. Certainly, use precision
weapons, but attack communications nodes, for example, if planners and military leaders
believe that enemy forces are not capable of coordinated action absent continuous central
direction. If friendly forces believe the enemys ability to conduct joint or
combined operations is weak and open to attack, go for the command and control nodes. By
all means, use our speed to penetrate and remain inside our adversarys decision
cycle.48 But do not waste limited-number,
high-cost weapons on purely symbolic targetsafter all, planning and execution of
warfare has always been about the effective allocation of scarce resources, whether time,
space, or forceuntil we are confident that the enemys capability to resist is
nearly finished. Does anyone seriously believe that such attacks on Japanese symbols would
have changed the outcome of a Home Islands invasion absent grave Japanese losses in
capability from the submarine guerre de course, the strategic bombing campaign, and
extensive air and sea defeats, capped by the atomic attacks?49

Most important,
perhaps, this is not an attempt to advocate the reflexive employment of overwhelming
force, for the choice is not between that and Rapid Dominance, as the latters
proponents might have it, but to exploit present and future US advantages to effectively
remove the capability of our adversaries to act rather than to attempt to attack
directly their motivation to act. The search for new methods of warfighting that
still achieve our ends when re-

127/28

quired can surely
address less expensive, less damaging, and less lethal methods, but such factors should
not determine the application of force. Nor is it to suggest that we back away from
improving our ability to integrate all elements of national powermilitary,
diplomatic, economic, informationbut to argue that when we do go to war, we need to
ensure that planners and military leaders systematically address the destruction and
degradation of enemy capability.

The point is most
fundamentally to recognize that the old rules of operational art still apply. Identify the
enemy center of gravity based on our objectives and his capabilities. Identify enemy
critical strengths and weaknesses and decide which are vulnerable to exploitation as
direct or indirect pathways to that center of gravity. Identify the enemys most
likely and most dangerous courses of action. Develop our own courses of action so that
they are specifically tailored to incapacitate the enemy. Recognize that the enemy will
almost surely present surprise and some of it will likely be very serious, requiring
substantial adjustment on our parttactically, if not operationally or strategically.
Understand that the planning and execution of systematic psychological and information
operations should support operations focused on incapacitation.

If we confront
small, weak adversaries, our resources may allow us to conduct more or less simultaneous,
nonlinear operations of great speed and tempo (à la Boyd) that overwhelm their capability
to respond effectively in a timely manner. But this is not a direct attack on willit
remains an attack on capability. It simply is an asymmetric application of forceour
C4ISR capability50 is more robust than theirs, and we exploit that difference.

Thus, the
recommendations here are prosaic: continue to seek power over our foes by rendering
ineffective their capability to resist; recognize that knowledge on the battlefield
will never be complete; and leave optimistic philosophies of warfighting to disputation in
the halls of academe.

Such common sense
was recently exhibited by a former Naval War College colleague, US Army Colonel Joe
Anderson, lately commander of 2d Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) in Iraq.
Having cleared out Fedayeen fighters from Kifl, Hillah, Najaf, and Karbala, he was asked
whether the paramilitaries would re-emerge after his unit moved on. He replied: A
lot of them are still there. But their weapon systems have been destroyed or removed;
their communications have been destroyed or removed; their barrackstheir
headquartersmany have been destroyed. You have to wonder how credible a force [they]
really can be now.51

NOTES

I am indebted to
Frank Uhlig, Milan Vego, and John Waghelstein for comments on earlier drafts of this
essay.

2. General Mustafa
Said Qadir, commander of military forces in the eastern Kurdish zone, referring to the
Ansar al-Islam fighters, quoted in C. J. Chivers, A Nation at War: In the Field; The
Northern Front; Militants Gone, Caves in North Lie Abandoned, The New York Times,
30 March 2003, sec. A, p. 1.

9. See Russell
Weigley, The American Way of War (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977).

10.
Optimismis the name given to the doctrine propounded by Leibnitz (and
later lampooned by Voltaire) that the actual world is the best of all possible
worlds, being chosen by the Creator out of all the possible worlds which were present in
his thoughts as that in which the most good could be obtained at the cost of the least
evil. Oxford English Dictionary.

14. Clausewitz, p.
2. While Clausewitz is also given the obligatory head nod by the advocates of Rapid
Dominance, they apparently missed this fundamental point. Curiously, they contend that the
Clausewitzian principle of affecting the adversarys will to resist is
their first order of business.

15. Current debate
over the center of gravity resembles nothing so much as the Medieval search for the
Philosophers Stone: if only we can locate the elusive center of gravity all our
problems will be solved. This debate lies outside the scope of the present article. On the
concept of center of gravity generally, and as taught at the Naval War College and
elsewhere, see Milan N. Vego, Operational Warfare (Newport, R.I.: Naval War
College, 2002), pp. 307-16. For an extended discussion of competing conceptualizations of
center of gravity, see Antulio J. Echevarria II, Clausewitzs Center of
Gravity: Changing Our Warfighting DoctrineAgain! (Carlisle, Pa.: US Army War
College, Strategic Studies Institute, September 2002), in which the author offers his
interpretation of Clausewitzs original intent for center of gravity.

17. Andrew Meyer and
Andrew R. Wilson, Sunzi Bingfa as History and Theory, in Strategic
Logic and Political Rationality: Essays in Honor of Michael I. Handel, ed. Bradford A.
Lee and Karl F. Walling (London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 99-118. Meyer and Wilson provide
an effective and much needed antidote to the widespread habit of ahistorically citing Sun
Tzu to validate any favored but empirically untested opinion. They make clear that because
of the constraints imposed by the time and place in which Sun Tzu was written, it poses
as non-historical, freeing it from the constraints of a particular reality, a particular
realm of praxis, apparently giving it the universal validity that is craved by
contemporary strategists.

21. Establishment of
the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC) at Dahlgren, Virginia, constitutes an important
step forward in this regard. Among other analyses performed in support of operations in
Kosovo, JWAC developed a detailed, empirically sound analysis of Slobodan Milosevics
crony network. Operation Enduring Freedom also employed a leadership targeting
cell.

22. Toward the close
of the American Civil War, a Confederate option to fight on as guerillas was the most
worrisome potential outcome of their defeat as conventional forces. That option was not
exercised only because of Robert E. Lees aversion to guerilla warfare and his strong
desire to save the rest of the South.

129/30

23. Former Secretary
of the Navy James Webb has not. See James Webb, The War in Iraq Turns Ugly.
Thats What Wars Do, The New York Times, 30 March 2003, sec. 4, pp. 1,
5.

24. Certainly, the
United States and its allies were also surprised by Pearl Harbor, the Philippines,
Singapore, and, generally, the speed at which the Japanese took such vast amounts of
territory in the early months of the war. We also were undoubtedly surprised by the great
skill of the Japanese in night surface battle, the quality of their torpedoes, and the
skill and daring of their aviators.

26. Approximately
700 surface suicide boats were based in Kerama Retto and Okinawa proper when US forces
went ashore. Donald Chisholm, Industrial Scale Asymmetric Warfare: Japanese Surface
Special Attack Weapons Against U.S. Forces in World War II and the American
Response, prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Military
History, Calgary, Canada, April 2001.

27. Winston S.
Churchill, The Second World War, Volume VI, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1953), p. 339. As quoted by Nicolai Timenes, Jr., in Defense Against
Kamikaze Attacks in World War II and Its Relevance to Anti-Ship Missile Defense, Volume I:
An Analytical History of Kamikaze Attacks Against Ships of the United States Navy During
World War II (Arlington, Va.: Center for Naval Analyses, 1970), p. 50.

28. During the
Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur insisted on the 15 September 1950 date for the
Inchon assault, even though mid-October would have presented comparable tides with the
benefit of additional time for preparing forces and logistics, largely because he did not
want to conduct operations during the Korean winter. In contrast, the Peoples
Republic of China committed more than 350,000 ill-equipped (woefully deficient in clothing
and food, especially) troops to the war, beginning in late October and through December,
in the sure knowledge that weather-related casualties would be considerable. In the event,
of the more than 37,000 Chinese casualties sustained in combat against the US 1st Marine
Division and associated US Army units in the Chosen area, perhaps half were from exposure.
On the Chinese decision, see Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain
Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press,
1993); Russell Spurr, Enter the Dragon: Chinas Undeclared War Against the U.S. in
Korea, 1950-51 (New York: Newmarket Press, 1988); and Patrick C. Roe, The Dragon
Strikes: China and the Korean War, June-December 1950 (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press,
2000). On casualties, see Lynn Montross and Nicholas A. Canzona, U.S. Marine Operations
in Korea, 1950-1953: Vol. II, The Inchon-Seoul Operation (1955); Vol. III, The
Chosin Reservoir Campaign (1957). Based on research by K. Jack Bauer (Washington:
Historical Branch, G-3, Headquarters, US Marine Corps, 1967).

30. Resort to terror
bombing resulted as much from the inability to lay bombs as it did from the belief that
such bombing would compel surrender by breaking the enemys will. The Allies
destroyed 79 square miles of German cities. On the extent of destruction of Japanese
cities and civilian casualties caused by aerial bombardment, see Kenneth P. Werrell, Blankets
of Fire: U.S. Bombers Over Japan During World War II (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1996). Overall casualty estimates vary considerably. The Japanese put
the totals at 241,000 dead and 313,000 seriously injured (Werrell, p. 227). The US
Strategic Bombing Survey put the death toll at 330,000, with 476,000 injured. The
Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs may have proven the final straw, but they were by no
means sufficient unto themselves by virtue of their unique properties and scale.

31. These
characteristics may also conduce to what is now popularly called asymmetric
warfare, which practically translates to actions that fall outside historically
acceptable Western patterns of conflict. See Roger W. Barnett, Asymmetrical Warfare:
Todays Challenge to U.S. Military Power (London: Brassey, 2003) for a useful
appraisal of this problem.

32. Christopher J.
Bowie, Robert P. Haffa, Jr., and Robert E. Mullins, Future War: What Trends in
Americas Post-Cold War Military Conflicts Tell Us about Early 21st Century Warfare (Washington:
Northrop Analysis Center, January 2003), pp. 2, 11-12.

34. Michael Thomas
Poirier, in Results of the American Pacific Submarine Campaign of World War II
(www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/cno/n87/history/pac-campaign.html), writes:

Japanese oil imports
fell from 1.75 million barrels per month in August 1943 to 360,000 barrels per month in
July 1944. In October 1944, imports fell even more due to high losses around the
Philippine battlefields. After September 1943, the ratio of petroleum successfully shipped
from the southern regions that reached Japan never exceeded 28%, and during the last 15
months of the war the ratio only averaged 9%. These losses are especially impressive when
one considers that the Japanese Navy alone required 1.6 million barrels monthly to
operate.

36. See Robert
Leckie, Strong Men Armed: The United States Marines Against Japan (New York:
Bonanza Books, 1962), p. 182.

37. Japanese
planners later explained their belief that Kyushu would be the next American target:

Various strategic
information for judging Allied intents were controlled by the Imperial Headquarters, and
from this information, deductions were made and issued to armies under direct control. The
Second General Army [responsible for defense of Kyushu] directed its efforts toward
gaining intelligence of the military tactics involved in the minute details of the landing
points, dates and strength of the Allied Forces based on the strategic deductions of the
Imperial headquarters. The methods for gaining this intelligence were: movement of
controlled planes (reconnaissance and photography); observation of frequency and direction
of U.S. bombing and reconnaissance within army area in the form of statistics; and study
of movement of task forces and of the development of international affairs, especially
that of American public opinion (through radio reception). The main points of issue in the
handling of information were: The problem whether the Allied Forces would conduct
operations on the CHINA coast prior to their landings on the home islands, or whether
SAISHU-TO and southern KOREA would be used as intermediary battle points when the home
islands were attacked directly. However, mainly due to the progress of the PHILIPPINE and
OKINAWA campaigns, the conclusion as mentioned before, that the southern part of KYUSHU
would be the first landing area, was reached.

From
Information as prepared by members of the staff of the Japanese Second General
Army, no date, Operational Archives, Naval Historical Center, Washington, D.C.

38. See John Ray
Skates, The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb (Columbia: Univ. of South
Carolina Press, 1994); and Thomas M. Swain, Pastel: Deception in the Invasion of Japan (Fort
Leavenworth, Kans.: US Army Command and General Staff College, 1988), pp. 35-36.

39. Swain, p. 36.

40. The extreme
scarcity of Japanese forces, equipment, and munitions mandated that they choose very
carefully what they would defend. See General Douglas MacArthur, Historical Report on
Allied Operations in Southwest Pacific Area. Volume II, Japanese Operations in the
Southwest Pacific Area, 8 December 1941 to 2 September 1945; and Commander,
Amphibious Forces, US Pacific Fleet, Operation Plan No. A11-45 (Advance Draft),
CAF/A16-3(1), 10 August 1945, Naval War College microfilm. For analysis comparing the
Japanese defenses with US plans, see Chisholm, Industrial Scale Asymmetric
Warfare.

43. John Dewey, The
Public and Its Problems (London: Allan Swallow, 1927).

44. Ullman et al.,
p. xix.

45. Apart from the
secular changes in the US strategic environment enumerated above, the proximate cause for
the development of Rapid Dominance was a variety of perceived US failings during Desert
Storm, a limited, highly conventional conflict carried out against a fumbling foe. It is
not at all clear that the scenarios for future conflicts will be analogous to those
conditions. Ironically, the type of problem in which will is most appropriately
addressedcounterinsurgencyis probably least amenable to attack as proposed by
Rapid Dominance.

47. This would
constitute a Type II erroraccepting a false hypothesis as true. On this common
phenomenon and its consequences for organizations, see Martin Landau and Russell Stout,
To Manage Is Not to Control, or the Folly of Type II Errors, Public
Administration Review, 39 (March-April 1979), 148-56.

48. See Grant
Tedrick Hammond, The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security (Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001).

49. However, my
Naval War College colleague, Bradford Lee, has pointed out to me that certain key icons of
the Emperors regalia were then kept at a coastal shrine on Honshu. Had we known they
were there and had we understood their extraordinary significance for the Japanese Emperor
and society, their capture or destruction might have had a significant effect on
the psyche of the Emperor and Japanese leadership. That it would have led to capitulation
absent destruction of capability is doubtful, especially given an ethos of suicide before
surrender.

Donald Chisholm is Professor of
Operations in the Joint Military Operations Department of the US Naval War College,
Newport, Rhode Island. He earned his A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in political science
from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty of the Naval War
College he taught at several universities, including the University of Illinois at Chicago
and the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a founding member of the
School of Public Policy and Social Research.